The other week the air conditioner guy came over to install an air conditioner for us in the living room. It was a hot day and K was coming back to the house with MiniHot from her parents’ place. I was glad that finally we would have some climate control.
While waiting for him to install the AC, I went out in the garden and did some weeding. I don’t have any plants of value growing out there now; at least nothing I have invested money in. And I like to see that I have small lizards and frogs living amidst the miniature jungle of dwarf greenery that has sprung up on its own. So while I have a plan for how I’d like the garden to look someday, I basically just try to keep the most troublesome weeds under control and let the rest do as it likes.
I decided early on that I would not throw away the weeds in the garbage. Instead, I removed a small collection of rocks that was left against the base of the house at one corner by the previous owner, and created a slight depression in the soil. I then piled the rocks around the depression making two sides of a rectangle with them, the other two sides being made up of the concrete base of the house and the concrete step outside the living room sliding door. I had made a little compost area. Any weeds I pulled up I put in that compost area. It was under the eves of the house and so it was dry. No weeds re-rooted themselves there. They withered and dried out. But as the weeds piled up they made a nice home for many small insects, gastropods and, hopefully, a comfortable hibernation place for the lizards.
So the other week, as I pulled up or dug up weeds, I was thinking about how each plant was using nutrients from the soil to grow, and I considered that in keeping the plucked weeds in my garden I was also keeping the nutrients in my garden. It was an amazing thing to consider, as I held a weed between my fingers, that plants transform nutrients from the soil into an edible source for animals. Everyone knows this but who really considers it? If we remove plants from the soil and burn them somewhere else or dispose of them somewhere else then we are effectively taking away the nutrients from the soil for good.
When Australian pioneers first set eyes on the thick forests of the east coast they didn’t think twice about the potential for clearing away forests and starting up farms. It was the natural thing to do for them to start up a new life as they had known in Europe. But Australia is an old continent, hundreds of millions of years old, and the nutrients of the soils have been mostly leached out over the eons. With very little volcanic or tectonic uplift activity to provide new nutrients, whatever nutrients the soils had held were mostly locked within the vegetation. Once the native vegetation was removed and the land prepared for farming, the pioneers found their crops were very slow to grow. I don’t doubt that the soil and clay deeper down in my garden is nutrient rich because even after clearing all the weeds away from the narrow walkway, a week later there are dozens growing back. But I still felt an enlightened happiness as I thought of all those nutrients in the weeds going into my little compost area and remaining a part of the little ecosystem around my house.
I began clearing away more weeds near the walkway when I found under a leaf a small egg-shaped white stone. Already I have found two small plastic toys in the garden, lost by the child of the previous owner, so it did not surprise me to see this white smooth stone. I was almost going to pick it up when I found two more hidden under the same plant.
Eggs!
I had accidentally uncovered someone’s eggs! But whose? The only birds I knew that laid such tiny eggs were humming birds but I also knew that they made small bird nests and didn’t leave them under weeds. I had never seen a humming bird around here either. No, it had to belong to the kanahebi – a lizard about the size of an anole, a kind of swift, I think the kanahebi are. I had watched them from the living room window earlier in the summer as they basked on the concrete wall or crept about in the greenery. I hadn’t seen them recently. Now a smaller brown lizard could be often seen wriggling in the grass and weeds. The eggs were too big to belong to that species.
I carefully put the leaves back over the eggs and stopped weeding for the day. I returned only to snap a photo and then left them. But I have been checking them each weekend and after two weeks they are still there. I hope they will hatch and little baby lizards will find shelter for the winter in my compost heap. Next year when I try to make a nice garden, I hope they will find it still a good place in which to dwell.
A kanahebi that I found while walking in a semi-rural area in July.
